My T1D life is full of small details: as a T1D I have to do consciously everything that my pancreas does without asking any help from my brain. The pancreas of a glucose-normal is seriously good at this! But we aren’t. There are tons of details to deal with, so we live a life of details, all the time, 24 hours per day—-although these details quickly turn into a regular part of our life. So let’s start right now with a few high priority items: our insulin regimen, our BG testing regimen, how we count carbs in order to calculate insulin injections, what we feel when we are high or low, how to treat a high and a low, and, finally, all the gear we need to do it all.
MDI (Multiple Daily Injections)
There are choices to be made when getting into the T1D lifestyle. One of them is: how will we, on an ongoing basis, inject insulin? When we start, we always start on a multiple daily injection plan (or MDI): every day, we inject insulin multiple times with an injecting instrument (syringe or pen). Eventually, we can choose to switch to a pump that we wear on our body (we are bionic, remember?) if we want to, which pumps insulin into you through an injection port on demand. Today, I use a pump, but like all diabetics, I started with MDI, so let’s talk about it.
Pen versus syringes
If I’m being honest, I can’t think of a reason to use syringes over pens, unless you want to dilute your insulin (we’ll get into that later). Syringes take up more space, they are single use, they are harder to be precise with, and pens are just so much sleeker.
T1Ds who use syringes use them in conjunction with a 1000U, 10ml glass insulin vial, which I consider bulky and fragile. I often read on forums the stories of T1Ds accidentally dropping and breaking a vial. Instead, I use small 200U cartridges that fit in an injection pen, onto which are screwed tiny needles: most people use 4mm needles, that you can hardly feel when you inject. I find that the pen protects the cartridge well, even, sometimes, from falls.
Growing up T1D 